


Rise Up My Shipwrecked Love

by ohmyohpioneer



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, Depression, F/M, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Lighthouses, i am so glad that lighthouses is a tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-04 18:21:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5343947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmyohpioneer/pseuds/ohmyohpioneer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Killian returns from the Underworld and is not sure what or who or how he is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rise Up My Shipwrecked Love

**Author's Note:**

> I am not sure where this came from, other than I was thinking about Killian post-Underworld and what that must do to a person; thought about what my own struggles with depression and picking myself up were like; about those people who have picked me up. 
> 
> So, basically, this is mildly angsty nonsense?

He expects a gaping sadness. An anger or a cutting ache like the one that ate at him following the death of Milah. What is torment if not an unbearable deficit of goodness?

But this is all numbness. A vague out of body feel that has him counting the boards above his head on the Jolly, and recounting, and thinking about how this is just fine, how he doesn’t need to move again.

Emma opens the door, most days. Walks in, sinks into the mattress next to him, runs her fingers at his temple, kisses where her fingertips trailed.

It’s fine, it’s good. He doesn’t have any words, and he doesn’t want to have to think about them. Isn’t equipped to produce any thought.

But she reads, opens books with broken spines and murmurs words he hears sometimes, a rushing eddy of voice that he can sail atop.

He’d rather have her there then not.

\---

She asks him to come with her.

Holds her hand out, brings her eyebrows together, steels her jaw in a way he knows stop it from shaking.

Asks him everyday, just about.

But he’s fine here. He’s fine with breathing in this space, not quite content but complacent, maybe, to sit up in his cabin and sit at his table to eat the chicken and rolls and Brussels sprouts she brings him.

He’s alive, and that’s a fact he has come to accept.

She loves him, and he accepts that, too. Loves her, in fact.

He just doesn’t know what that love means anymore. What good it can serve either of them. What him being alive next to her – also alive – means for any of this.

Why his affection matters to her. Why she can look at him with kind, soft eyes when he has torn her, let her bear his most hateful words.

Emma sits across from him and nods encouragements as he eats ashen food, and he does it because she wants it.

\---

“Come on,” she grabs his boots from the corner, and he admires how graceful she is. How she stoops her shoulders, how she bows and her coat pulls at her shoulders. How lovely she is.

“I’m fine here, Swan,” he’s drawing lazy circles in charcoal on a blank page in the leather bound sketch book she’d given him only the week before.

“Nope!” She smiles, and tugs his hand, bends to put on his boots for him.

“I’m not an invalid,” but he doesn’t feel able to do much of anything. He hates it, really. Never was one for self-pity. And it’s not hatred or morbidity or resignation that keeps him on his ship, in these four walls.

“Then come on!” Her smile isn’t quite as free, not as languid or begrudging, or any of those words that he remembers, that made him move his lips against hers.

He tugs the shoes on, doesn’t know what to make of the way he feels like they are too big or too small, but tilts his head anyway.

“Where to, Swan?”

\---

They take David’s car beyond the town lines.

He watches as the trees give way to a great rocky shore, and the white gray of the sea in winter.

Her knuckles are white around the wheel, but he opens the window against the freezing air, and breathes until it hurts, and she reaches to grip his thigh.

He loves her, but she doesn’t need his love.

\---

Emma pulls the lever after they stop in an empty lot.

It’s white and snow-dusted, wind gasping sideways at the side of the vessel, and he doesn’t even notice she’s out of the car until she opens his door.

She lift both hands to him, open, and there is a pressing at his breastbone that he almost doesn’t recognize for its alien pangs.

Her cheeks are red and raw, and maybe if he brought his own cheek to hers, his would take in what life she was wiling to offer.

\---

It’s stunning and lonely, the lighthouse she leads him to.

A churning light that bounces off waves, and come round again to hit the whitegold of her hair.

“This way,” she doesn’t have gloves on and he can feel the chill down to her bones, but it is the first time since his Return that he’s felt much of anything, and he wants to push her palm at his heart. Freeze it, start it, move it again.

Her feet jump easily along the horizon of rock between the swallowing expanse of ocean and the looming solitude of the lighthouse tower.

She drags him down to sit next to her, gaze tracing the unerring path of brightness, kissing his shoulder, and his being lurches.

“I know,” she doesn’t move her sight, “I know this isn’t easy.”

“No,” he agrees.

“I just wish,” the thickness in her voice pricks at him, “I wish you would be mad at me. I wish you’d hate me.”

There is no lie in her voice, and he’s been to hell and back – literally – and he’s stunned by the admission.

“Swan–“

She’s crying now, and he hasn’t hurt since he came back, but this, this is not him. This is  _her_.

“And you won’t even call me by my name and –“

The horn sounds loud and echoing, empty. No ships nearby. No one to warn. Echoing and cold.

“I miss you.”

He nods, moves his head to touch his chin to the crown of her head, “I know.”

\---

Time means little to him now, just as those bleeding and continuous days in Neverland, and some indeterminate amount of time later, she grasps his hands and leads him to the shore, to another somber lighthouse.

It’s beautiful, he thinks, and leans into the warmth of her shoulder.

\---

He wakes in the middle of the night.

A gasping, jarring jerk to wakefulness that leaves him damp and twisted.

He wakes and he  _misses_  her.

Sits with his head in his hands, and agonizes over the way he hasn’t looked at her in weeks, months. Wishes he had done this differently. Wishes he had run his fingers through her hair to loosen the knots. Wishes he had placed his mouth at the corner of her own, at the place that her jaw and neck meet. Wishes he had given her his love not for him, but for  _her_.

He wakes and throws on his coat, moves, truly moves, for the first time in what must be eons.

\---

She’d blinked awake, startled, sleep-heavy, and bloody gorgeous.

He watches has her foot presses against the pedal and the car moves under the streaking stars and past the still forests.

“We almost there?” she asks with a low, sleepwarm voice.

“Aye.”

\---

He’d found this one on a fold out map on the vehicle’s passenger side door. A happy, red and white drawing marking the place of another beacon.

This time, he greets her when she rounds to his side of the truck, overcome with the way her eyelashes tangle with one another from her tired rubbing, and cradles her face between his palms.

“I’ve missed you,” he sighs at her parted lips.

\---

And it wasn’t pity that brought him here. And it wasn’t anger, either.

“I don’t know how you can still love me, Emma,” he makes a point to take her name, put it forth as an apology.

Her nose presses at the hollow of his throat, and he hasn’t felt a single stirring in so long, he’s not sure how to keep himself from crying at the tender ease of the gesture.

“The thing about lighthouses,” she brushes at his collarbone, “people think they exist to keep others away, to keep others safe.”

“Hmmmm.” His fingers curl in her hair as she moves back, frames his own winter-raw cheeks in her hands.

“What they forget,” her smile is quiet and sad and so very, very Emma, “is that lighthouses need keeps, too."

She is light, he thinks, as he folds her tight, feels the blood in his heart thrum and churn.


End file.
